Often the artist is able to penetrate deep into natural phenomena, relying on his special perception of the world, anticipating scientific minds. Bright representative post-impressionism, the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in his painting “ Starlight Night” was able to depict the phenomenon of turbulence - the amazing secret of the flow of fluid and light.

Composition from memory

The view of the starry sky over the village is Van Gogh's most emotional work. The artist wrote it in 1889 during treatment in psychiatric hospital: He suffered from hallucinations and fears.

The disease did not prevent Van Gogh from working: even being constantly indoors, he independently came up with new shapes and colors in order to give vent to strong emotions.

revolving skies

Van Gogh did not like it when other artists created an exact copy of the world around him with a photographic identity. To capture the essence of objects, he simplified the forms, curved the lines, much like in old woodcuts. In Starry Night, Vincent created a picture of the sky at night with circular strokes, with clouds of clouds and stellar swirls. He, like other Impressionists, depicted light differently than his predecessors, as if catching it in motion, for example, through the glare of the sun on the water or the twinkling of stars in the milky curls of the blue sky.

The reason for this effect is the brightness and intensity of the light palette of the picture. The primary visual cortex of our brain, which distinguishes the contrast and movement of light, but not its color, connects two spots of different colors with the same brightness (yellow and white), and the central zone of the brain sees contrasting colors (yellow and blue) without mixing them. Since these processes occur simultaneously, the light in the painting pulsates and shines.

Science imitates art

Understanding the essence of turbulence is not easy, but we can describe it using visual arts. Half a century after Starry Night, the Soviet mathematician Kolmogorov developed an understanding of turbulence by developing a mathematical model for the phenomenon.

Turbulent flow is a cascade of energy: large eddies transfer energy to small ones and further along the chain. Examples of such a stream are: the great red spot on Jupiter, cloud formations and interstellar dust particles. Celestial whirlwinds on Vincent's canvas set in motion both the stars and the moon, and part of the trees and even the lower part of the composition.

In 2004, using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists saw swirling clouds of dust and gas around the star V838 in the constellation Monoceros, very reminiscent of Van Gogh's stars. This interested scientists in Mexico so much that they began a detailed study of the light in the artist's paintings. Scientists have discovered an explicit model of turbulent flow, subject to the mathematical laws of Kolmogorov in several paintings by Van Gogh - "Starry night", "Road with cypresses and a star" and "Crows over a wheat field".

The researchers digitized the images and calculated the fluctuations in luminosity within each pair of pixels. They concluded that there was a striking similarity between the lines on the artist's canvases, during mental unrest, with the dynamics of turbulent currents. The self-portrait with a pipe, painted during a quieter period of life, shows no signs of such coincidences. On the one hand, it is naive to believe that the genius of the artist inspired him to turbulent subjects, but at the same time, it is even more difficult to explain the impressive fact that, during a period of mental disorder, Van Gogh managed to understand and pass through himself the secret of hydrodynamics.

Pictures of the great artist help scientists to study natural phenomena

GENETICS: A GENIUS IMMORTALIZED THE SUNFLOWER MUTATION

The Dutch impressionist Vincent van Gogh is like a cosmos that everyone can study: from artists and art critics to doctors and astronomers. The other day they became interested in ... genetics.

In Van Gogh's famous Sunflowers series, strange flowers can be seen. Usually, a sunflower flower has a dark circle in the center framed by large golden petals. In the artist, we see that the central disk of flowers is hidden under the disheveled dark orange growth. Until now, it was believed that this is a fantasy of a genius. It turned out - no. Van Gogh meticulously immortalized a mutation that sometimes affects sunflowers. This conclusion was made by scientists from the University of Georgia.

What kind of mutation causes such a strange "disarranged" form? The researchers speculated that perhaps the cause of flower changes is mutations in the CYC genes.

The family of these genes affects not only the structure of flowers in other aster genera related to sunflower, one of the authors of the study explained Mark Chapman. - With this gene, "Vangogh flowers" with an almost absent central disc are practically unable to reproduce. Insects have nothing to pollinate. But how the genes of such mutants work, we did not know. Therefore, we decided to conduct an experiment.

In order to get a sunflower, "like Van Gogh's", geneticists crossed an ordinary sunflower with a semi-mutant one, that is, with one in which the central disk was not very "shaggy". Such plants could still produce offspring. As a result, scientists got the famous sunflowers.

They appeared due to mutations in the HaCYC2c gene, Chapman argued. - It penetrates into all tissues of the plant and turns it into "shaggy" and barren.

The discovered mutation, which the genius immortalized, is not widely distributed. It appears randomly and is quickly washed out of the population.

oceanology

One day, while admiring Van Gogh's Starry Night, NASA specialists suddenly discovered that they had seen something similar somewhere - in their laboratories, on their computers. They checked it and it turned out - for sure: there is a similarity between this canvas and ... NASA's model of ocean currents.

Recall that the picture depicts huge stars surrounded by spherical halos of flickering light. Some are pale gold, others are white-hot - they create a sense of rotation. As if yellow-white whirlpools are spinning. (By the way, Greek electrical engineer and artist Petros Vrellis decided to use this effect. He created an interactive reproduction of this painting. To create it, he used the touch screen and openFrameworks tools. With the touch of a finger, you can change the animated canvas to your liking, and then return everything to its original form.) All this spiraling, curving and twisting "orgy" resembles ocean currents when viewed from space.

The NASA model was built thanks to a science project studying the role of the ocean in future climate change scenarios. It is called Ocean Climate Assessment Phase II (ECCO2). "Our experts have a high resolution models of the oceans,” a NASA spokesman explained in a press release. “And they found eddies and currents in the ocean that carry heat and carbon dioxide around the world.” The interactive ECCO2 model simulates ocean currents at all depths, but only surface currents are used in a specially created visualization - to compare with Wang Gog currents.

In addition, it turned out that the same "Vangogh whirlpools" also form huge greenish accumulations of phytoplankton in the dark waters around the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that form the most important link in the food chain in the ocean. When it blooms, undercurrents bring nutrients to the sun-lit surface of the ocean. And as a result, these microscopic plants grow and multiply.

According to some experts, Mother Nature’s paintings of “swirls” turned out to be much more intricate than those of an impressionist artist. But this is understandable. Not only does nature have a giant planet as a “canvas”, and not a canvas measuring 73.7 by 92.1 cm. And the creator of the masterpiece himself was not in the best shape. Van Gogh painted "Starry Night" in June 1889 during a stay in the psychiatric hospital of St. Paul of Mausoleum near Saint-Remy. He experienced severe bouts of depression. And only in rare moments of relative calm did he devote himself entirely to painting. And it was to the "Starry Night" that Van Gogh returned to correct something, on the night when he committed suicide.

ASTRONOMY: IMPRESSIONIST EXACTLY CAPTURES THE BIG MOON PHENOMENON

And not so long ago, an American astronomer from the University of Texas, Donald Olson, became interested in Van Gogh. He drew attention to a painting called "Moon Rising". On it, the crimson Moon peeks out from behind the top of the mountain and illuminates everything with an ominous red-orange light. Maybe it's the sunrise and the artist just got it mixed up? - art critics asked. She is very big and bright. But they did not have the opportunity to check: the exact date of the painting was unknown.

After conducting his own investigation, Olson found out that the painting was painted on July 12, 1889. On this day, Vincent was in the same mental hospital in San Remy. And he painted a picture, looking out of the window of his chamber.

It was the so-called “lunar illusion,” the astronomer convinced. - That is optical illusion, at which the perceived size of the Moon is about one and a half times larger when it is low above the horizon, compared to how it is perceived when it is high in the sky, although its projections on the retina are equal in both cases.

The astronomer explained the appearance of strange shadows under the mountain. It turned out that Van Gogh painted this picture in two steps - he started in the evening and finished in the morning. Therefore, the moon was depicted rising in the evening. And the shadows under the mountain appeared because they were cast by the rising Sun in the morning.

All experts are convinced of one thing: despite the fact that Van Gogh often allowed himself all sorts of impressionistic things like unnaturally bright colors and distortion of perspective, he never distorted reality. So, for example, astronomers studied several paintings of the artist's night sky and made sure that each of them was written with astronomical accuracy. One of them - "The White House at Night" - depicts a huge star above the house. It turned out that it was Venus. On the day the masterpiece was written - June 16, 1890 - it shone especially brightly.

QUOTE

"Whenever I see the stars, I begin to dream - just as involuntarily as I dream, looking at the black dots that geographical map cities are marked. Why, I ask myself, should the bright dots in the sky be less accessible to us than the black dots on the map of France?

Just as we are driven by a train when we go to Rouen or Tarascon, death takes us to the stars. However, in this reasoning, only one thing is indisputable: while we live, we cannot go to a star, just as, having died, we cannot board a train. It is probable that cholera, syphilis, consumption, cancer are nothing but celestial means of transportation, playing the same role as steamboats, omnibuses, and trains on earth. BUT natural death from old age is equivalent to a pedestrian mode of transportation ".

A paradoxical discovery was recently made by Russian and European mathematicians. They literally figured out the unique gift of the great Dutch painter. It turns out that he saw something that mere mortals are not given - turbulent air flows. Van Gogh, without knowing it, can save humanity from plane crashes, scientists believe. After all, earlier scientists could not describe the phenomenon of turbulence, invisible to the naked eye.

Like many geniuses, the great Van Gogh was, to put it mildly, strange. It is a known fact that in a moment of spiritual crisis he cut off his ear. However, this was no ordinary delusion.
- The study of the mathematical model of the paintings of the great Dutch artist showed that some of his paintings depict turbulent vortex flows invisible to the eye that occur during the rapid flow of liquid or gas, for example, when gas flows out of a jet engine nozzle,” Viktor Kozlov, professor at the Moscow Aviation Institute, told us. - A peculiar, as if chaotically looped manner of writing by the artist, as it turned out, is nothing more than a distribution of brightness corresponding to the mathematical description of a turbulent flow.
The foundations of the modern theory of turbulence were laid by the great mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov in the 1940s of the 20th century. However, there is no exact description of it to this day. Now the situation may change.
According to the researchers, many of Vincent van Gogh's paintings (such as "Starry Night", painted in 1889) contain the characteristic "statistical fingerprints" of turbulence. As scientists note, "turbulent" works were created by the artist in those moments when his psyche was unstable. At this time, the painter was visited by hallucinations, tormented by depression. Visions that haunted Van Gogh poured out on his canvases into uneven, as if nervously twisted spirals. He repeatedly admitted to his friends that, having made another sketch, he calmed down for a while, as if he had completed some important mission.
“Apparently, Van Gogh had a unique ability to see and capture turbulence, and this happened to him precisely during periods of mental disorder,” argues Professor Kozlov. - At the same time, the artist has paintings where "traces of turbulence" are invisible. Among them is the famous "Self-portrait with a pipe and a bandaged ear" (1888). Van Gogh, having injured himself, was under the influence of sedatives, in particular bromine, and, in his own words, was in a state of "complete rest."
- Van Gogh's gift is unique, - says our interlocutor. - Researchers have digitized his works and calculated them mathematically. Apparently, he is the only artist who could draw turbulence. The paintings of other painters, even those similar in style of painting, do not contain the correspondence of Kolmogorov's theory. For this reason, it is the work of Van Gogh that can become a turning point for modern science. With its help, scientists are going to develop the theory of turbulence and finally explain this phenomenon. Its solution will help, for example, to solve this problem in aviation: after all, today the cause of many air accidents is precisely turbulence.
Who knows, maybe Van Gogh's "mission", "destiny", which he told his friends about, was, among other things, the salvation of distant descendants? In this case, are doctors always right when they provide their patients with "complete rest"?

1. Van Gogh's air currents

Mathematicians who studied Van Gogh's paintings came to the conclusion that the swirls on some of his canvases quite accurately describe turbulent air flows invisible to the eye. This is expressed in the fact that the greater or lesser brightness of the points in the patterns is proportional to the velocities of the flow points in the corresponding coordinates in the mathematical modeling of turbulence. Scientists also note that similar paintings, including the famous Starry Night, were painted by Van Gogh during periods of mental instability.

2. Da Vinci Melody

In "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci, the melody is encrypted. It was discovered by computer technician Giovanni Maria Pala: if you draw along the picture stave, then slices of bread on the table and the hands of the apostles can be read as notes. Even skeptics admitted that the harmony of this melody is impeccable and it could not accidentally appear in the picture.

3. Nude Mona Lisa

The famous "Gioconda" exists in two versions: the nude version is called "Monna Vanna", it was painted by the little-known artist Salai, who was a student and sitter of the great Leonardo da Vinci. Many art critics are sure that it was he who was the model for Leonardo's paintings "John the Baptist" and "Bacchus". There are also versions that dressed in a woman's dress, Salai served as the image of the Mona Lisa herself.

4. The secret of the old fisherman

In 1902, the Hungarian artist Tivadar Kostka Chontvari painted the painting " Old Fisherman". It would seem that there is nothing unusual in the picture, but Tivadar laid a subtext in it, which was never revealed during the life of the artist.

Few people thought of putting a mirror in the middle of the picture. In each person there can be both God (the right shoulder of the Old Man is duplicated) and the Devil (the left shoulder of the old man is duplicated).

5. Revenge of Salvador Dali

The painting "Figure at the Window" was painted in 1925, when Dali was 21 years old. Then Gala had not yet entered the life of the artist, and his sister Ana Maria was his muse. The relationship between brother and sister deteriorated when he wrote in one of the paintings "sometimes I spit on a portrait of my own mother, and it gives me pleasure." Ana Maria could not forgive such shocking.

In her 1949 book Salvador Dali Through the Eyes of a Sister, she writes about her brother without any praise. The book infuriated El Salvador. For another ten years after that, he angrily remembered her at every opportunity. And so, in 1954, the painting "A young virgin indulging in Sodomy with the help of the horns of her own chastity" appears. The pose of the woman, her curls, the landscape outside the window and the color scheme of the painting clearly echo the Figure at the Window. There is a version that this is how Dali took revenge on his sister for her book.

Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" is considered by many to be the pinnacle of expressionism. It is curious that the artist himself considered it an extremely unsuccessful work, and it was written at the time of the master's mental discord. What is so unusual in this canvas - let's try to figure it out further in the review.

1. “Starry night” Van Gogh wrote in a mental hospital

The moment of creating the picture was preceded by a difficult emotional period in the life of the artist. A few months earlier, Van Gogh's friend Paul Gauguin had come to Arles to exchange paintings and experiences. But a fruitful creative tandem did not work out, and after a couple of months the artists finally quarreled. In the heat of emotional distress, Van Gogh cut off his earlobe and took it to a brothel to the prostitute Rachel, who favored Gauguin. So they did with a bull defeated in a bullfight. The matador got the severed ear of the animal.

Gauguin left soon after, and Van Gogh's brother Theo, seeing his condition, sent the unfortunate man to the hospital for the mentally ill in Saint-Remy. It was there that the expressionist created his famous painting.

2. "Starry night" is not a real landscape

Researchers are trying in vain to figure out which constellation is depicted in Van Gogh's painting. The artist took the plot from his imagination. Theo agreed at the clinic that a separate room was allocated for his brother, where he could create, but the mentally ill was not allowed out into the street.

3. Turbulence is depicted in the sky

Either the heightened perception of the world, or the sixth sense that opened it, forced the artist to depict turbulence. At that time, eddy currents could not be seen with the naked eye.

Although 4 centuries before Van Gogh, a similar phenomenon was depicted by another brilliant artist Leonardo da Vinci.

4. The artist considered his painting extremely unsuccessful

Vincent van Gogh believed that his "Starry Night" was not the best canvas, because it was not painted from life, which was very important to him. When the painting came to the exhibition, the artist rather disparagingly said about it: "Maybe she'll show others how to do better night effects than I did.". However, for the expressionists, who believed that the most important thing is the manifestation of feelings, "Starry Night" has become almost an icon.

5 Van Gogh Created Another Starry Night

There was another "Starry Night" in the Van Gogh collection. The stunning landscape cannot leave anyone indifferent. The artist himself, after creating this picture, wrote to his brother Theo: Why can't the bright stars in the sky be more important than the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, so we die to get to the stars.”.

Today, the works of this artist cost fabulous money, but